My Policeman (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

Another year, another dull gay romantic drama. Read: gay tragedy. As important and beautiful as these movies can be, most queer audiences -- the kinds who flock to see these films -- had their fill back in the 2000s. Now, two decades later, we haven't come much farther, apparently. One wonders if filmmakers are ambitious to play the heartstrings of awards voters, if they think heartrending stories of closeted gays in forbidden romances are hot topics, or if they themselves just want in on the Brokeback Mountain prestige. I don't mean to decry queer films in general, of course, but only good representation is actually good representation. Thank goodness for this year's Bros, right? But that makes My Policeman feel just that much more tone deaf and disappointing.

An older couple live together, now retired, in a quiet seaside town, each pretty much keeping to him- and herself. Tom (Linus Roache) takes their dog on long walks along the white rocky cliffs, and Marion (Gina McKee) watches wistfully out her windows and putters around the house. Their passionless doldrums are interrupted suddenly when a recent stroke survivor arrives in his wheelchair. The man is Patrick (Rupert Everett), their long-estranged friend, who Marion had volunteered to take in and care for. Patrick seems uncomfortable but grateful, and occasionally tries to bark out resentment from his clenched jaw and barely audible speech. Marion is clearly guilt-ridden. Tom avoids Patrick at all costs. We're quickly launched into their story in vibrant flashbacks, alternating these warm scenes of the past with the dismal, grayscale present.

In the 1950s, Marion (Emma Corrin) and Tom (Harry Styles) meet on a beach in Britain and soon start dating. She's educated and somewhat ambitious, he's humble and dashing and contentedly working-class. Tom becomes the titular policeman soon enough. During their dates, they eventually meet Patrick (David Dawson) in a museum he curates, after he acted as a witness in one of Tom's cases. The trio spend all their time together; often Marion and Tom are hand-in-hand, but Patrick often seems attracted to Marion, who seems happy to encourage their intimate friendship. Until, that is, she espies the two men being rather intimate shortly after her marriage to Tom. 

This revelation of their closeted sexual relationship almost destroys Marion. Nervous and disgusted and heartbroken, she desperately seeks help that won't come back to ruin her beloved husband. The film seems uncertain of its focus: are we meant to sympathize with the frighteningly homophobic Marion, whose prospects at the time are certainly to be ruined and whose love for Tom remains mostly unaltered? Or are we meant to sympathize with Tom and Patrick, doomed under the norms and laws of their country? Tom seems to be in love with both people, but he must lie to Marion to live his truth and he must hide his relationship with Patrick to survive. It's just a lot of the same old shit.

Screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, The Painted Veil, Freeheld) seems like a natural fit for a story like this, but that doesn't stop this project from feeling like a boring box he's dejectedly checking off. It seems he found inspiration not from his own wonderful body of work but rather from insipid, sentimental claptrap of the likes of Nicholas Sparks; the film founders in its back-and-forth approach between present and past. I found it difficult, though, to be fair, to know if the dialogue was truly as awful as it sounded or if that was the fault of the actors. The older cast is pretty good, although Everett is utterly wasted in his role. The younger cast tries, bless them, and Corrin and Dawson do pretty well to convey the massive unspoken emotional pains of their experiences. Styles is almost unwatchable; sure, he's pretty enough to look at, but his mannerisms and tone feel like a bumbling fool who doesn't know what he's doing. His delivery is monotonous and riddled with unearned angst. If it's a character choice, it makes no sense as the fulcrum of this love triangle; if it's not, it shows his inexperience as a leading man with embarrassing magnitude. Together, the three have no chemistry whatsoever, even as friends. Despite being fairly attractive and the source material itself, of all things, they are mind-numbingly dull to watch.

It doesn't help that director Michael Grandage (who has met great successes on stage) demonstrates no sense of style, vision, or even inspiration in telling this story. Why is it relevant right now, and what is beautiful in the story? There appears to be only minimal collaboration between him and his team. Grandage seems to want a sexy, sad portrait of unspeakable desires -- see the numerous sex scenes that are about as boring and even cringey as the rest of the film -- while Nyswaner wants sentimental romance and the tragedy of regret and wasted time. Cinematographer Ben Davis works really, really hard to marry the two by using contrasting color palettes and some lovely visuals, but there's only so much he can do. Even the editor seems determined to fix Styles's deficiencies by sharply editing around his scenes, stopping us from seeing his painfully forced emotional reactions to the story, which is funny until it becomes annoying.

Mark me, I don't think it's a terrible film altogether. The present-day stuff is quite nice, cinematography and production design are lovely, and some people occasionally need a tearjerker and it may as well be a queer one. But the unfocused and derivative screenplay -- which mostly utilizes the perspective of a straight woman effectively spying on the men through diary entries -- makes the whole thing a jumbled, unsatisfying slog. And then there's the rushed ending, which might have been powerful (and a shining moment for McKee and Roache specifically) but ultimately squanders whatever psychological and emotional depths developed for these characters in favor of a slapdash bow meant to make everyone feel tired and sad. We're not allowed to understand the characters in this character drama, and so there's no real reason to care what happens to them after they've all done such awful things to each other.